How and Why To Entice Your Readers and Get Inside Their Mind

This post is about how your user (the common person who comes to your blog or website through a search engine result page) and not your regular users.

Landing page optimization and Readers

So we now consider how a searcher thinks, searches and moves ahead. As we all know the most preferred search engine is Google. I do not know if there are any search engines (including yahoo or msn) which even give traffic or have searchers. Yes they do, but only a very small percentage. Now let us come to some facts

• Most searchers use search engines to help them aid in their buying decisions (from purchasing and business point of view)
• Only 30-40 % people make a purchase online with the help of a search engine.

When targeting audience we should consider the buying behaviors of both men and women. It is generally seen that men have a pre determined vendor stores like eBay, Amazon etc while they do search. So if your website happens to show up in search they would just read on the info and pass on spending very little time on your site. On the other hand women are seen to make decisions much slower, spending more time on a site thereby giving you an advantage of making sales or getting a loyal reader.

What makes a searcher feel that they have landed on the correct page they might be looking for?

The answer is simple. Follow these simple rules

• What is your website blog about? Convey this directly to your user on your entry landing page and you are a winner. Do I need to say about the loss you might occur if people can’t figure out what exactly your website/blog is all about? You might see one thing increasing though. Bounce rates!!!
• Be sure to include the target keyword into prominent locations of your website landing page including header, and other prominent locations where they can be spotted easily
• Actions speak louder than words. So does pictures. Include picture of the item you are selling or if possible a picture gallery as well. Landing pages must be attractive and catchy as well.
• Be sure to add some value added services to your website/blog landing page. It may include anything like free bonus add-ons (Consider a set of eBooks as bonus if you are selling a main stream targeted eBook), free shipping etc.
• One thing you must be very clear about is your pricing. Most people do not spend the time trying to fill out forms asking you for a quote. Of course there are areas where you can possibly tell a definite price for your service like in case of web development service. But do give an approximation like “STARTING FROM 500$ onwards…” and so on. People might be looking for cheaper alternatives and hence they won’t bother to bother you. It is a win-win situation for both of you, saving your time
• Don’t feed your website with Junk. Make it a clean and professional layout. Don’t include advertising in your site if you are offering professional service. It will make your website/ service amateur.
• Trust. The most important thing. Suppose you sell goods like eBay. You have to give a strong reason for people you choose you over the so well established sites like eBay and Amazon. How do you do that? Well I suggest getting a private SSL certificate so people can securely buy things from your website. Please avoid PayPal at all cost. Well it may be free to use but from a customer’s point of view you are just being amateur again. Of course you can have PayPal as an additional payment option but never make it your main selling option.
• Comparison of different features of products in the same range. Give them this and your chances of making a sale boost to more than 300%.
• Make sure your website is easy to navigate with all the links following in and out in visible and important sections of your web page. I remember once when I tried to purchase a coffee machine online in a store other than eBay and amazon. It took me a lot of time to figure out how to order exactly. So I simply quitted the site and went over to eBay. See how they lost a SALE???? Not only buy now buttons, but your home page, about us, contact us all must be easily visible on your landing page.
• Reviews about your website are very important. Give client testimonials and reviews inside prominent locations on your website landing pages to give your sales a boost by 100- 200%. I strongly urge you not to cook up testimonials about your website or service. Most people are smart enough to detect them and will mar your reputation.
• Customer support- Adding live support would be a great advantage to your service. Most people prefer live chatting with company officials and not sending emails and waiting for reply. It is extremely important to do this if your competitors are offering this service as well. Make live support a prominent feature on your entry page. You can get LiveZilla which is a freeware application for your live support.
• Speed. The website must be sufficiently fast to load. This would mean code optimization of your website/blog, hiring a dedicated server if needed and so on. Normally it is seen that people won’t wait for websites/blogs which take longer than 10 seconds to load. So keep the important information on your landing page and give the add-on details on later pages.

The truth about searchers

It is generally seen that the searchers use the following patterns while searching

• Browse through the top 4 or 5 listing maximum
• Organic listing is that way to go. However, generally organic listing gives importance to how to, buying guides and stuff. If people are particularly into buying something they may look through the sponsored listings as well.
• Some people are having the notion that google is always right. They think that if a website/blog tops in SERP’s then they must be relevant. However search engines can be inaccurate and give you bad results. I have noticed visitors to my websites for keywords which are not even mentioned in my website once!!!
• If they don’t find what they are looking for on the landing pages of their website then they probably look down on the organic listings. Maximum they may browse the first page. Then they simply change their keywords to find more relevant searches and hence page 2 search result gives you little or no deal.